ABSTRACT
This comprehensive investigation into the involvement of ordinary Christians in Church activities and in anti-clerical dissent, explores a phenomenon stretching from Britain and Germany to the Americas and beyond. It considers how evangelicalism, as an anti-establishmentarian and profoundly individualistic movement, has allowed the traditionally powerless to become enterprising, vocal, and influential in the religious arena and in other areas of politics and culture.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |2 pages
PART I The priesthood of all believers: from principle to practice
chapter |2 pages
swiftly modified to suit circumstances, the deep concern for all Christians and for individual religious experience, which remained at the centre of Reformation and post-Reformation thinking, paved the way for the rise during the eighteenth century of what can be recognized as modern evangel-icalism. The importance of Martin Luther
chapter |2 pages
institutional church’s pretensions, both political and theological. Yet, as his later opposition to the fanatics demonstrates, he had no intention of putting the Bible into the hands of the laity simply for each believer to do with it as they would. His emphasis upon the fundamental perspicuity of scripture did not deny a role in the church for theological professionals nor did it insist that each person was as competent to discern the meaning of scripture as every-one else. Thus, the need for proper theological education was maintained by
chapter |2 pages
the condition of the dog and toad . . . yea, gladly would I have been in the condition of the dog or horse, for I knew they had no soul to perish under the everlasting weights of hell for sin, as mine was like to do.
chapter |3 pages
Bullinger combined. Nevertheless, Bunyan’s Mapp exists in direct lineal descent from Calvin’s work and from the work of his most prolific Reformation apologists. One must hesitate, then, in accepting Gordon Wakefield’s claim that Bunyan was ‘a signal example of Lutheran influence on English Protestantism, tempering Calvinism’. The scholastic treatment of conver-
part |2 pages
Part II Lay religious activity during the Enlightenment
chapter 5|1 pages
Reshaping individualism: the private Christian, eighteenth-century religion and the Enlightenment
chapter |2 pages
explained by the rise of a new individualism in the Enlightenment? It can safely be assumed that she had not read Descartes’ Discourse on Method or John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. It will be necessary to take the long way around and tell the larger story of the rise of individualism if the significance of Margaret Austin’s experience is to be appreciated. The rise of individualism: the Renaissance
chapter |2 pages
Martha Claggett
chapter |2 pages
identity squarely in the modern period. Indeed the genre emerges uniquely in the mid-seventeenth century on the cusp of the modern period. It is not Luther and Calvin who write conversion narratives – we have to piece together the details of their spiritual biographies from fragments in their the-ological writings – but their later descendants. Conversion narrative as a popular genre emerges in the mid-seventeenth century in the context of what Ernest Stoeffler calls the post-Reformation experiential tradition. Early examples include August Hermann Francke in
part |2 pages
Part III Tensions surrounding an active laity
chapter |2 pages
expanded opportunities for the laity. Among the most important of these practices were itinerancy, voluntary association and disestablishment. Itinerancy
part |2 pages
Part IV Missions and the widening scope of priesthood
chapter |1 pages
Industry, professionalism and mission
part |2 pages
Part V The church of the laity